


Enough For Now

by lapseinjudgment



Category: Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018), Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, More tags to come as the story progresses, She never does it she just thinks about it, Sort Of, TW Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2019-10-11 09:52:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17444636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapseinjudgment/pseuds/lapseinjudgment
Summary: Karolina lies there and feels Nico breathing, slowly, in and out. It isn’t much, but it’ll do for now.OrHealing is not a linear process.





	1. Aftermath

“You’re luck you didn’t see it.” 

That’s what everyone kept saying. She saw it in Molly’s expression every time she came in the room; she could hear the words every time Alex spoke, an undercurrent to anything he said. She could feel it in the way Leslie would look into the room sometimes, never speaking but her gaze a silent pressure on the back of her head. She was so very, very lucky that she didn’t see it happen. So lucky to have been in the car with Chase, exhausted to the marrow of her bones from the repeated drainings she’d been put through. Better to lie there unable to move than to have seen it happen.

(Except that you _had_ seen it. Every day you’d spent trapped in that tube you’d seen it. Over and over, so many times you thought Jonah would have gotten bored. 

Apparently killing Nico Minoru never lost its appeal.)

It had been quick, and brutal. One minute Nico had been fighting Mrs.Yorkes - and is that what she should still be calling her? Did finding your friend’s parent was a serial killer put you on a first name basis? Should she be calling her Stacey? Or should she be calling her the-alien-formerly-known-as-stacey? - triumphant and terrifying. (Those were Alex’s words, not yours. You had long since decided that if Nico wasn’t afraid of your powers you would never be afraid of hers.) The next moment Jonah had leapt across the pool, glowing so brightly Chase and Karolina could see him from the car. After that, four seconds was all it took. 

One: Jonah grabbing Nico’s arm, yanking her off balance. Alex swore he saw purple scales appear around Nico’s eyes just before the world exploded, a nuclear detonation in the palm of Jonah’s hand.

Two: a shriek that Karolina could feel in her bones. The sound of metal hitting flesh, a sickening crunching sound. 

Three: a second, wetter crunching noise, a split second of silence, the sound of a body hitting the ground.

Four: another burst of light, the same sound of falling, the metallic sound of the Staff striking the ground, then nothing.

Karolina sighed, shifting a little. The first day she’d been too nervous to even sit on the bed, taking up a post on an uncomfortable wooden chair next to it. Now, four days on, the worry was a distant memory. If spilling cold water on Nico’s face didn’t get any reaction stronger than a groan, this certainly wouldn’t. Karolina stretched out next to her, eyes tracing a well worn pattern across Nico’s gaunt features. 

First stop was the bruising running down the left side of her face, beginning to drip down onto her neck. All mottled black and blue and purple, and some small part of Karolina wondered if the next time she saw Nico with black eye shadow she would simply start crying. If the reminder would be too much. 

(And there _would_ be a next time. Nico would wake up, and she would tell you she was never letting you out of her sight again, and tell you that she loved you and you would say it back and it would all be okay, it would it would it would.)

She reached out, settling her hand as gently as she could on Nico’s collarbone. It had stopped being enough to watch her chest move on day two; now she had to feel it to really believe it was happening. Slow, shallow breaths in and out, a miracle each time her hand raised and lowered. If she pretended hard enough she could trick herself into believing these were Nico’s only injuries: a skull fracture and four broken ribs. (There was that pesky brain hemorrhage as well, oh no, couldn’t forget that, couldn’t forget the reason Molly had dragged you out of the car, carried you to Alex and a dying Nico so you could hold her hand as she passed. Couldn’t forget the moment when you realized you couldn’t hold the hand you were reaching before because it simply wasn’t there.)

It was something Nico had discussed quite a lot, actually; the possibility of someone else needing to use the Staff because she couldn’t. How it would have to be Karolina, because the Staff didn’t hurt her the way it did everyone else. It was a conversation Karolina had never wanted to have, never wanted to think about but there, in that second, looking down at her dying girlfriend with her missing arm, blood running from her ears and nose, it was one she was glad they’d had. 

It had taken Jonah four seconds to try and end Nico’s life; it took Karolina three to save it. 

One: drag her fingers through the warm blood (don’t think about that). 

Two: let the blood drip onto the Staff and watch it drink it in (don’t think about that either). 

Three: watch it come to life and beg. “Save her, please.” 

Nico’s left arm is still missing below the elbow, but she’s breathing and moves in her sleep sometimes, and those are both decidedly good things. The purple scales are perpetual around her eyes, almost indistinguishable from all the bruising, and Karolina decides that must be a good thing, too. She’ll ask Nico about it once she wakes up, and then Nico can give herself a new arm and everything will be okay. It will. 

There’s a shuffling outside the door, a murmured conversation between Molly (who has taken to her job of bodyguard very seriously) and whoever just approached. There’s an off chance it's Xavin, but they’ve been keeping a respectful distance lately. More likely its Tina, come to see her daughter. Or Jemma (as she had asked to be called when she followed you to the car, begging to be taken with you), trying to visit Nico so her host will calm down. It’s hard to know who is who until they start talking. If Tina is in control she’ll ask to sit with Nico alone; if it’s Jemma she’ll apologize for not stopping Jonah sooner, for waiting to be sure you’d made it to the car first. It’s surreal, the idea that you can simply tell someone no and have them obey.

Molly sends whoever it is away. Karolina lies there and feels Nico breathing, slowly, in and out. It isn’t much, but it’s enough for now.


	2. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I give up, this is in second person from now on.

You’re lying on your back and a man you don’t know is clutching your arm. His grip is tight enough to hurt, and you want to tell him to let go but can’t summon the energy to do more than look at him. You see long, white hair, panicked brown eyes, and then nothing.

...xXX…

You don’t notice the next time you open your eyes. All you can see is blackness, and it isn’t until you sit up to find a pair of giant spectral eyes staring at you from the horizon that you realize your eyes are actually open. You’re in a black but not dark space sitting on a wet but not damp floor, and no matter where you turn giant, burning purple eyes are watching.

It’s up there, as far as nightmares go.

You’re dressed, at least, which means this isn’t a stress nightmare.. Your hair is down, your face feels free of makeup, and there’s no polish on your nails. You can stand, and you don’t move like you’re underwater, so you start to wander.

Your left hand feels oddly unresponsive.

It’s bigger than most of your dream spaces. Your nightmares are almost all in enclosed spaces: Amy’s room, the pit at the dig site, the box you’d watched them put Destiny in. More dreams of being locked and buried in a coffin than you want to think about. Of watching others be locked and buried. But this dream is huge, one endless expanse under watchful eyes.

Frowning, you reach up and run your fingers along your skin, and you can feel scales around your eyes. So maybe it isn’t a dream: maybe this is where the Staff takes you when it eats you (and that’s what it feels like when it happens: teeth and hunger and some great unknown wanting swallowing you whole), and you’ve never been here long enough to notice before. It isn’t a comforting thought, but it doesn’t concern you as much as it should. Everything is distant and muted, and nothing hurts.

It should be fucking terrifying, but since terror is one of the many things you can’t feel it’s just awesome.

You can’t tell how much or even if time is passing, but you manage to establish a few things. One: you can’t get tired. You run through kendo stances, gymnastics routines, and endless sparring combinations- everything your mother would wake you and Amy up at ungodly hours to drill- without losing breath. You even run (which has always been on your To Avoid list), which is how you discover the second thing.

Two: you can’t get anywhere. No matter how long you run (and if you want you can run forever), the eyes don’t seem to get any closer. Though that may be more a question of scale than distance, and that thought stops you from trying to get closer. 

Since there’s no one here, you decide to indulge in a terrible habit you’ve long since broken. You bite your nails to the quick, nipping at the skin around them until it should be a bleeding, horrid mess. It never happens: just like you can’t get tired, you can’t get hurt, either. 

You can’t feel the pressure of your teeth on your left hand. You’ve gotten good at not thinking about that.

Forever later, you realize you aren’t alone. Sometimes, just for an instant, you see another person. Every now and then there’s a burst of colour in front of you, and then it’s gone. It’s so quick it takes you thirty repetitions to truly be sure, but some details fix themselves in your brain. What you are seeing is a boy, about your age, wearing a black and blue cloak. You keep seeing him mid stride or mid jump, so whatever he’s doing seems to be under his control. Most of the time. Once or twice when you see him he’s clearly falling. 

Just once, you see him with someone else, a blonde girl about your height, surrounded by bright light. You think she’s looking at you as they pass, but can’t be sure. Either way, the sight of her makes your chest ache. (It has been ever and ever since you’ve thought of Karolina. If someone were to show you a picture of her, you don’t know if you would recognize her.

You barely know who _you _are, anymore. Maybe even less than you know her.)__

____

So when the boy stops mid jump the next time you see him, its a minute before you remember that you’re supposed to talk to people who come up to you. Which he does. He walks over to you and settles himself cross-legged. His face is open and friendly, and he has a nice smile. 

____

“Tandy thought I was going crazy when I told her I kept seeing someone here.”

____

“I think I have to side with her on this one: what sane person comes here on purpose?”

____

He chuckles at this, and you revise your opinion: he has a beautiful smile. “Is Tandy the girl from the other…. time?” You haven’t thought about time in so long that you’re not sure how to phrase the question. He nods and you watch his expression change, soften in a way that makes your heart melt a little. “Tell me about her.”

____

So he does. He tells you about Tandy, and you find yourself telling him about Karolina (and it’s been so long since you’ve thought of her you only know the shape of her name anymore, and goddess is it lovely to feel your tongue curl around it again). You trade stories about them, talk about athletics and magic and powers you can barely comprehend. You talk of Billy and Amy, of the indescribable pain of losing your sibling and believing down to your bones that it was your fault, whether rightly or wrongly. The conversation spirals from there, and the more you talk the more you remember, as that muted feeling begins to fade away. With each word you feel more grounded in your body, and as you watch shadows begin to coalesce around him.

____

(If you had thought to look, you’d see that he’s pulling them free of you, one word at a time. Freeing space to let you rebuild yourself, memory by memory.)

____

It takes a while for you to run out of words, and longer still to realize he’s mostly just been listening while you ramble. You’re immediately apologetic. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to talk so much. I don’t even know your name, do I? Did I ask your name? My name is Nico.”

____

“It’s Tyrone,” he says, “and don’t worry about it. It’s why I’m here.” 

____

“What do you mean?”

____

Ty shifts from his sitting position to a crouch, stretching his back as he does. “Tandy and I, sometimes we find people who are trapped in their own minds. I think that’s what's happened to you, Nico.” Ty rubs the back of his neck, and looks like he’s choosing his words carefully. “I think you’re connected to this place like I am, but I think your connection got overloaded and now you can’t get out. When I found you you were fading, but you’re back now, and I’m going to try and get you out, if that’s alright with you.”

____

You nod, and for the first time in years you don’t try to fight the fact you’re crying. You don’t want to be here anymore, don’t want to be alone in the dark. You want your friends, and you want to properly tell Karolina how much you love her, and the intensity with which you realize how much you miss everyone is more than you can stand. But Tyrone is crying a little, too, and that makes it easier to bear. 

____

He reaches over and cautiously gestures for your left hand. You tangle your fingers together, wiping at your eyes with your other hand. Fear rises in your throat as the gravity of the fact you can’t feel it begins to settle across your shoulder. “Everything’s going to be alright, I promise. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Now open.”

____

A surge runs through you, and a million years away, back in your body, you do.

____


	3. Awakening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nico wakes up on day seven, and it’s nothing like you expect. When it happens, it is not perfect, and you should have known it wouldn’t be: when you dream, Nico has both hands.

Nico wakes up on day seven, and it’s nothing like you expect.

Your daydreams about this followed an established pattern: Nico would wake up during the night. She’d watch you sleep for a while and then wake you up as well. She’d smile at you, and make some horrible joke about how for all your promises that you would come back to her, she’s the one who keeps saving you. You would laugh and cry and apologize, and she would tell you it was okay and that she loved you (not lamp or lump but love), and you would say it back and everything would be perfect.

When it happens, it is not perfect.

(You should have known it wouldn’t be: when you dream, Nico has both hands.)

It’s one in the afternoon and you’d been fiddling with the healing sachet under Nico’s pillow (the same one she made for Gert, actually), so it takes you a moment to notice that something in the room has changed. For the first time in seven days, the Staff of One has gone out. 

(It had been active ever since you saved Nico, propped against a wall for fear of you knocking into it and deactivating it, a constant glow that eventually just became visual noise.)

But the Staff is out now and as you look you can see that the scales around Nico’s eyes have vanished as well. A sob starts welling in your throat because the scales had been a Good Sign and now they’re gone and -

One brown eye opens, and the weakest, most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard asks for the bathroom. You nod frantically and call for Molly, and between the two of you you’re able to help her there in time. Outside the bathroom you and Molly are jumping and hugging (you might be flying, she might have thrown you in the air; neither of you are really thinking about it), and you’re so relieved that Nico is awake and talking that it takes you a moment to understand whats happening when she starts to scream. 

It’s a split second scream that devolves into coughing and moaning, and Molly runs for Chase while you run for Nico. You find her crumpled on the floor, crying on the side of her face that isn’t swollen shut and babbling nonsense as she gestures frantically to her missing arm. 

Chase and Molly find you crouched behind her on the floor, one glowing hand on her face and the other on her ribs, hoping she still finds the warmth of it soothing. You don’t expect Chase to swear under his breath and pull your hands away, don't expect him to tell you that the heat will only make it worse. He cradles the uninjured side of Nico’s face in one hand and coaxes her to look at him, voice steady and sure like it is when he talks Gert through a panic attack. It’s a litany of “you’re going to be okay, I promise, I just need you to breathe deeply for me now, I’m sorry, I know it hurts, Karolina can you get us some ice, please?”

You feel the words deep in your chest, a violent, burning sting. You have so many things you want to say at once that get tangled in your throat, and all that comes out is a strangled squeak. (You don’t want to leave, you didn’t mean to make things worse, you’re _sorry_.) You feel tears well up and you’re about to start crying when a hand comes to rest on your shoulder. “It’s alright, I got it,” Molly says, and then she’s racing from the room. 

Apparently “going to get the ice” means “leaning over the railing and yelling for Xavin to do it.”

Nico flinches at the noise and you forget about reprimanding Molly. (Someone is going to have to talk to her, though; she can’t keep asking Xavin to do things for her because she doesn’t want to do them herself and Xavin is too sweet to say no. But those were the sorts of conversations that Nico always handled, and no one has been willing to take up that uncomfortable mantle.) You wrap your arms gently around Nico’s waist and press a kiss to the back of her neck, murmuring that she'll be okay. She relaxes a little against you.

While you wait for the ice, Chase is running Nico through what you think must be basic neurological tests. Follow his finger with her working eye, clench her teeth, touch her nose and then his finger, yes she can have another try since her depth perception sucks right now, wave her hand once she can see his finger in her peripheral vision. The fact he knows how to do this, combined with how patient and professional his tone is, adds to the growing sense of unease you’ve been feeling this entire week. His familiarity with how to treat injuries is too practiced to only be from lacrosse. You want to ask him about it, but you’re not sure either of you could stand the answer. 

There’s a knock on the door and all three of you look up to see Molly and Xavin standing in the doorway, holding ice packs, the biggest glass of water you’ve ever seen, and a bottle of ibuprofen. Molly drops down in front of Nico and presses the ibuprofen into her hand while fiddling with a straw for the water. Nico pops the pills and goes for the water before Molly has the straw ready. You realize what's going to happen before Nico does, and you snag the water before she can reach it. 

“Just wait until Molly‘s got the straw, okay? I know you’re thirsty but spilling it all over yourself won't fix that.” Nico can’t really turn her head to glare at you, but the time it takes her to try lets Molly get the straw in the glass. You realize just how weak Nico must be when she just lets you hold the glass for her. 

There’s banging on the stairs like someone is running up them, and the bathroom can’t really hold five people but it’s about to have to deal with seven and half as Alex and Leslie pile in, and you’re starting to worry about Nico getting overcrowded. Xavin climbs into the tub to make room, and you watch as your mother changes her mind at the last second and backs off, electing to stand outside the room as Alex pushes his way next to you. He hugs Nico quickly and you expect to feel a flare of _something_ (sadness, most likely; jealousy had always made you feel more lonely than anything else) but you don’t, you just feel grateful because you’re here, and she’s here, and you’re both surrounded by your family. 

Not your whole family, and that’s a problem that really needs to be dealt with, but you’ve always been good at looking on the bright side of things. On any other day you’re sure Nico would be pissed as hell to have so many people touching her at once (she’s still leaning on you, head tucked into your shoulder, Molly is holding her hand, and Chase has his hand on her shoulder. Alex’s hand is on her wrist above Molly, and you’re pretty sure Xavin is doing that thing where they project images into someone’s mind because they’re touching her neck), but for now she simply settles back against you, and a moment later you feel her breathing even out into sleep. 

This is so much better than your daydreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: this was meant to be chapter two, and then it felt like so much was missing that I ended up pushing it back. This also marks the end of what I had pre-written before I started posting this, but given how little attention my supervisors pay to what I'm doing at work, I can't imagine it will take long for the rest to be up.


	4. Day One

Caring for someone and _caring_ for someone are two vastly different things. This is a lesson you learn over the next few months. The Nico that wakes up is in many ways not the Nico you remember, and reconciling that fact takes time. The Nico you remember took great pains not to rely on others; this one has no choice.

When Nico wakes up after the bathroom incident, she’s back in your room and despite your best efforts to get people to leave, everyone but Leslie is still there. Which is really unfortunate, because Nico is awake for maybe a minute before she looks at you, mutters “teacup”, and vomits over the side of the bed. Molly screams and jumps off the bed, Chase charges out of the room after her, and Alex doesn’t quite make it out before the smell reaches him and he starts retching, too. It’s disgusting and chaotic, and you realize you’ve never had to clean up someone else’s vomit before. You’ve never even had to clean up your own, and you feel so, so young in that moment.

This shouldn’t be your life. This shouldn’t be any of your lives.

You’re standing by the bed, trying to decide if you should comfort Nico or start thinking about how best to clean up the vomit when Chase is back, pushing a bowl into Alex’s hands before running to put a second one by Nico’s head. Xavin is by the door looking lost, like they wish someone would tell them what to do. You can understand that: all you want is for someone to tell _you_ what to do, too. They leave, and you think they’ve gone to check on Molly when suddenly they’re back with a bucket and a couple of wet towels. “I’ll help clean,” they say, and you’re so grateful for them in that moment. 

You listen to Chase talking to Nico as you and Xavin clean, and it strikes you that he could be a really great dad one day. You hear him tell Nico to rinse her mouth, see him wipe her face for her before easing her off her injured side and onto her back. She mumbles something to him and his face falls. He’s got the same stricken look he had when Gert started going into withdrawal, and your stomach bottoms out. 

“Nico,” he says softly, “what’s my name?” 

“Talkback”, she replies, and you and Chase look at each other. 

When he points to you his hand is shaking. “Nico, what’s her name?”

She turns her head to look at you, brown eye tracing over your features. She has a smile she reserves just for you, one where she’s goofy and nervous and so in love everything about her screams it, and it’s that smile that’s on her face now. “Beatles,” she says, and there it is. The last straw.

You’re sixteen. You’re homeless. Your parents are murderers, you aren’t human, and the girl you love -who lost an arm and nearly died trying to save you- doesn’t know who you are. 

You cry.

...xXX…

Alex thinks it’s the head trauma. Chase and Jemma think it’s the scrambler darts (and you’re inclined to side with Jemma here, given that she’s sharing a brain with the woman who designed them). Leslie points out that it’s probably both and for the first time in a long time you agree with your mother, though in the end it doesn’t actually matter. The result is the same: Nico can speak, but she can’t _talk_. 

The good news is that she knows who you are: while you and Chase were panicking in the hall Molly had snuck into your room with a notebook and a pen and had Nico write her answers instead. Molly emerged a few minutes later to confirm that Nico knew exactly who you were, was super confused about why you both just left, and that she really, _really_ wanted to know what happened to her arm. 

That awful conversation falls to Alex. 

You don’t know if Nico wants space or not, so you tell her you’ll be outside and don’t wait for a response. The story Alex tells her is different than the one he told you, and you listen more than you mean to. The perspective is different (which makes sense; she was part of the rescue party, not one of the people being rescued), but the beats are the same: Jonah arrives, Nico’s eyes go scaly, he vaporizes her arm, and beats her with the Staff. Jemma arrives and attacks him, but it’s too late, Nico’s already dying. 

Alex tries to stop the bleeding but there’s nothing he can do, Nico’s lost too much blood, so he screams for Molly to bring you back. You can hear that he’s crying at this point, his voice hitching as he describes Molly carrying you while he tried to wake Nico so she could see you one last time. You’re crying too and you wonder if Nico is as well, or if she’s holding it all in. 

(And you’ve done so much goddamn crying lately, you just want to run out, to never cry again, but it seems unending. Like everything from the last few months is hitting you all at once and nothing can make it stop.)

Alex rushes through the rest of the story once he’s got himself under control: you using the Staff to save her, the week that you’ve been holding vigil over her, waiting for her to wake up. Jemma defecting. Nico is silent through it all, and you recognize this as one of her dangerous types of silence. The tense, simmering kind, where she’ll either retreat further into herself or explode. 

“Take beach.” The words make no sense, but the tone is clear: she wants him gone, ideally five minutes ago. A second later Alex passes you, gestures to the room and just looks at you hopelessly, like being her girlfriend magically means you know how to make her better. And maybe you do; the only way to know is to try. 

When you enter the room Nico is sitting up in bed, propped against the pillows. She isn’t crying, but her shoulders are shaking and you’ve never wanted to hold her more than you do right now.

(You’re pretty sure that’s not true, but you’ve only slept about five hours this week and everything feels more intense than usual.)

Nico glances up when you walk in and you can’t read her expression. You try smiling at her and it doesn’t change, she just looks from you to her left arm and back again. You had thought the moment you saw her kill Jonah was the worst of your life (not even because he was your father, but because she was _Nico_ and she _killed_ someone), but you’re wrong. The worst moment of your life is when Nico does the math about whether saving you was worth losing her arm, and comes up short. 

You don’t have to wait for her to tell you to get out; you’re out the door before she can say a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the fact this chapter was wildly spiraling out of control length wise, I’ve scrapped the predicted length entirely and am just going to write until it’s done. 
> 
> I promise this isn’t going to be an endlessly frustrating scenario where you’re yelling “just talk to each other, dammit!”


	5. Weeks 1,2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Talking about your feelings: the leading cause of relationships staying together since always.

Now that you aren’t afraid Nico is going to die at any moment, you’re able to catch up on some sleep of your own and focus on getting better. You spend two straight days basking in the sun, and the rest of your time being anywhere Nico isn’t. This is made simpler by the fact that Nico spends much of the next two weeks asleep, and aside from when she needs help in the shower, she doesn’t see much of you. (It doesn’t matter if you can't bear to look at her, there's no way you’re letting anyone else help her shower). 

And when Nico does see you, well. It’s like she doesn’t understand that she ran you off: she keeps touching your face, trying to get you to look at her (which is made additionally awkward by the fact you’re wearing a tank top and underwear and trying to undress her. You’d never actually seen her naked before she needed help with this, and the romantic in you is inconsolable).

She keeps repeating the same meaningless phrase over and over: “Beatles, five verb staff verb? Welcome, five verb staff verb murder?” You keep your eyes fixed over her shoulder, not meeting her eyes or otherwise engaging. It’s not that you don’t want to be there for her, but you just… can’t. Not yet. You wish you could make her understand how you can’t deal with the guilt you feel every time you see her, every time you hear her crying, every time see the moment of realization in her face when she goes to reach for something and the arm she’s reaching with isn’t there. 

There was a price, and she paid it, and every time you look at her you remember the look on her face when she decided you weren’t worth it. 

Once, you find Jemma in your room when you’re going to check on Nico. She looks nothing like Tina: she’s wearing a pair of Gert’s jeans and one of your shirts, her hair is up and she’s missing the enormous earring Tina’s so fond of. Jemma freezes when you enter, hand still holding Nico’s left arm. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know I’m not supposed to see her until she’s better, but she’s her daughter. Tina was going crazy. I’ll be gone before she wakes up, I promise.” 

“That’s okay,” you reply, moving to the door. “I’ll let you have some privacy.” You’re gone before Jemma can reply.

(It’s becoming a thing with you.)

...xXx…

It’s the eleventh day of you avoiding Nico when Xavin calls out, “Karolina, could you help me with something, please?” Even after a month and a half of living with humans Xavin prefers not to raise their voice, so if they’re actually calling for you something must be wrong. 

The first thing you see when you turn into the room is Nico sitting on the bed. She’s wearing her sling and is looking deeply uncomfortable as you try to boomerang out the door. Xavin blocks you, turning and locking the door before you can escape. “I’m sorry, beloved, but Nico’s thoughts have been very loud lately, and I offered to help her talk to you.”

Nico has always been loud with her emotions, ever since you were children, and that’s only gotten more pronounced since you ran away. It’s one of the reasons you could never understand how Alex had so much trouble reading her: whatever she thought was always right there in everything she did. Slamming doors, biting words, her makeup (and you don’t mean the goth look in general; lately more elaborate looks tended to mean she was taking more time to center herself), the sort of theatrics that would make your father proud. You can only imagine how loud that must be psychically. 

Your eyes flick from Nico’s sling to her still bruised face and then away, guilt coiling itself between your lungs. This is apparently Nico’s breaking point.

“Beatles reject odd sight staff!” She explodes, wincing as her hand flies to her broken ribs. “Five verb staff verb, Beatles? Welcome, staff refuse university five staff verb. Staff welcome, welcome line staff.” She’s distraught and breaking at the seams, and you don’t want her to feel that way but you also _don’t understand what she’s saying,_ and -

“What did I do, Karolina? Please, I don’t know what I did. I’m sorry, please talk to me.” It’s Nico’s voice but the cadence is wrong, and you’re so shocked to hear her speaking words you understand that you forget all about wanting to run. Xavin has their hand on Nico’s wrist, and they’re speaking in her voice. Translating what she’s thinking. You move to sit on Nico’s other side. 

“I thought you didn’t want me around,” you whisper, and you deserve the look Nico gives you. 

“What the fuck gave you that idea?” Nico asks through Xavin. “All I know is I started crying and you ran away, and you’ve been avoiding me ever since. Which makes no sense, since Alex told me you spent the whole week watching over me, and that you keep sneaking into our room when I’m asleep.”

You realize you’ve been quiet too long when you see they’re both looking expectantly at you, and you’re not sure how to respond. You don’t know how to explain, and it’s the sight of Xavin still touching Nico’s wrist that gives you the idea. “Xavin,” you ask, “do you think you could project something from my mind to Nico’s? It may be easier if can show her what I’m thinking.” 

Xavin pauses, turning the idea over in their mind. You focus on that, rather than on the intense way Nico is looking you, concern etched across her features. After a moment, Xavin nods. “Yes, I think I can do that, my love.” Nico rolls her eyes at that and it hits you all over again just how glad you are that she’s alive. 

Xavin offers you their hand. You take a steadying breath, and plunge.

...xXx… 

(You want to think that Jonah was kind to you, in the beginning. That he tried to talk to you like you were his daughter. But if he was ever loving or kind when you were in the simulation, it’s been buried under the weight of how he punished you when you disobeyed. 

Alex told you that it had taken them a month to rescue you and Chase. But you and Jemma, you know different. You know how much Jonah had messed with the time on the simulation. You were there for what felt like a year, and after a hazy week or so, every day became the same.

You would be in your house, and it would be a beautiful day. The sun would always be shining, you would be clean, and you wouldn’t be hungry. Nico would have stepped out to grab something in another room, and in just a moment, you’d see her again. Every time, the thought made you smile. 

Once, you decided you didn’t want to wait for Nico to come back, and instead went to meet her in the kitchen. She was on tiptoe reaching for a glass and you snuck up behind her to grab it for her. She had yelped and spun around, and it had been like a moment out of any one of a million romcoms. 

That had been an uncommonly wonderful day

The next time you went into the kitchen early to find her, you found Jonah there instead, drinking a cup of coffee and standing over Nico’s dead body. Her eyes were enormous in her scalded face, staring at you blankly. Jonah had smiled at you and apologized that you had to see that. That he was just so angry that she had taken him away from you, and every time he came to visit she would be here, somewhere, no matter how many times he reset the simulation. This was supposed to be his chance to reconnect with you, but she just kept ruining it with her presence. 

You don’t make her watch what he does to her beyond that one simulation. It is gratuitous, and cruel, and neither of you need to relive it.

There was one day that Jemma came to you. You had just been drained for the fourth time, and the weakness had followed you into the simulation. You’d been lying on a couch, too tried to open your eyes or even think. Jemma crouched next to you, threading her fingers into your hair. “Would it be better or worse, if I gave you a good day?”

“Better,” you whisper. You don’t open your eyes, just feel a squeeze on your hand, and suddenly your head isn’t resting on the couch anymore. It’s resting on Nico’s thigh while a movie plays in the background, and you nap for most of that day as she idly braids your hair. You let yourself pretend it’s real.)

...xXx...

It’s not a one way conversation: while you’re sending memories to Nico, she’s doing the same. Hers are disjointed and hazy, but what comes across makes you wish all over again that you had never split up.

Nico sitting in your room, your clothes strewn everywhere, praying over your bracelet (and where she got that you can’t begin to guess). Loud voices, hers and Alex’s. A migraine, brilliant and agonizing after a sixth failed spell to bring you home. Leslie wrapping bandages around Nico’s fingers, Molly begging her to try again, the growing feeling that she’s not good enough not good enough WHAT ARE YOU GOOD FOR YOU CAN'T EVEN DO THIS RIGHT-

Nico, sitting in the bathroom with the Staff and a razorblade, trying to talk herself up to something she can never bring herself to do.

And then she’s got you. You’re back in her arms and everything is right again, but only for a second before she has to hand you off to Molly so she can hold off Stacey, Victor, and her own _mother_. The next thing Nico knows she’s awake and she _hurts_ , hurts so much, and her mind is foggy and she doesn’t know what’s going on but her arm is missing and you’re holding her, saying everything will be alright but you’re making the pain worse and it’s all too much and she just wants it to _stop_. 

She’s awake again and her arm is still missing and she’s so nauseous she can’t see. Alex is telling her what happened (the gist of which she already knows because yes, Alex, she can understand that her _fucking arm is gone_ ). 

Nico wishes that she was 14 again and that Amy were here, that her dad would hold her and tell her that it would all be alright, that he loved her, and that she could believe him when he said it. Hell, she would even take Tina’s awkward attempts at comfort because at least back then she would try. But Amy had been murdered and her parents _were_ murderers and nothing was going to be okay ever again. 

You walk in the room and Nico’s eyes dart between you and her arm and nope, that’s it, the line is behind her, she’s going to cry. She’s going to cry and you’re going to hold her and tell her she’ll be okay instead, and it will mean more than her dad saying it ever could. But you don’t do that; you look at her and all Nico sees in your face is despair and then you’re running from the room.

The worst moment in Nico’s life is when you look at her and decide that you can’t do this.

...xXx…

There is a moment after Xavin lets go of your hands when all three of you are just staring at each other, completely at a loss for words. After the second passes you realize you’re not at a loss for words; you’re too emotionally wrung out to even form them. All three of you are looking at each other when Nico asks, “Sunrise?” You and Xavin nod, too done to even parse out what she means. You shuffle more fully onto the bed, and when Nico reaches for you you don’t shy away. 

You aren’t sure what the next morning is going to bring, but you finally feel like you and Nico are on the same page, and that’s more than enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter fought me every step of the way and while I'm still not totally satisfied with it, I was also at the point where I was just spinning my wheels in editing.


	6. Weeks 3, 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Progress is perfection, as they say.

Before you were taken, when you and Nico went to bed she always insisted on being the big spoon. You never argued with her: you were happy to let her hold you then and you’re happy to let her hold you now. You would never wake up that way; you would migrate overnight, and wake up to a face full of jet black hair, curled around Nico’s body. 

That is not how you wake up this morning. 

This morning Nico’s head is on your chest, her breath curling in the dip of your collarbone. She mumbles in her sleep, and you press a kiss to her hair. Xavin is asleep on Nico’s other side, totally dead to the world. They’ve morphed in their sleep, changing into something green with pointy ears. You smile, and pull Nico closer. For the first time in three long weeks, when you think everything will be alright, you believe it. 

...xXx…

You spend the rest of the week making up with everyone. You take Molly, Jemma, and Xavin to Starbucks to thank them for all their help, and an hour later Molly has to help you drag the two aliens out of the cafe. Jemma tries to flirt with any woman who looks her way, regardless of age, (which raises a few questions for you about how old Jemma is in relation to Tina, how common same sex attraction is on Majesdane, and if Tina has more in common with her daughter than either of you thought), and Xavin pronounces the caramel macchiato the greatest achievement of your galaxy with such sincerity that one of the baristas starts crying. Jemma commends the baristas for their service and asks how large a tip would be required to effectively pay the staff double for the day. 

Sugar is apparently uncommon outside your solar system. 

Next on the apology list are Chase and Alex. Chase’s hair has grown a lot during the month you two spent in suspended animation, and you spend an afternoon teaching him to braid it, which he really seems to enjoy. As gently as you can, you broach the subject of his skill with tending injuries, and offer to listen if he ever wants to talk. He doesn’t, but he doesn’t shut you down when you bring it up, so you consider the door open. 

Alex is trickier. Your original idea was to try and make spicy chicken after he brought it up one night when you were all reminiscing about food you missed. (Chase: steak sandwiches, Molly: readily available hot sauce, Gert: latkes with applesauce, which lead to the biggest fight you’d ever seen between her and Chase, who insisted that latkes were better with ketchup. Nico would sell a kidney for a decent burger. You’re just waiting for the day you can go back to being vegan - your food allergies haven’t appreciated homeless cuisine). In the end you take him for breakfast at a food cart, and the two of you have a lovely morning.

Leslie doesn’t accept an apology- she simply hugs you, and tells you how proud of you she is. Despite everything, it means the world to you

You dedicate yourself to learning to understand what Nico is saying, with mixed results. On the interesting but harmless side, you find out the weird nicknames she’s been calling everyone are her phone contacts (she has you listed as Lucy in the Sky, and you’re touched that she remembered your favourite song). On the genuinely unsettling side, you confirm your theory that she’s referring to herself as the Staff, and you file that away for a later conversation. Beyond that you pick up a few key words: bathroom is “hiding”, thirsty is “Gert”, out is “beach”, pain is “Amy”, and dizzy is “teacup”. Teacup and Amy, those are the watchwords.

...xXx…

Each day Nico wakes up and her eyes are a little clearer, her mind more focused. This week sees her able to stand up for an entire shower rather than sit, walk unsupported around your room, and though it takes close to an hour and several rests to counteract the vertigo, she makes it down the stairs with only moral support. She starts to come back to herself, though it’s clear the experience has changed her: she’s more cautious, more willing to ask for help, and more self assured when it comes to you. You only realize now that it’s gone that there had been a measure of hesitance when she kissed you before, like she had been afraid to ruin it. Now, though, she kisses you like she’s sure, and you settle easily into this new intimacy. 

Three days later, you learn your first real lesson in caring for someone: there is a fine line between supportive and patronizing. With Nico in particular this line is not only a hair trigger but also a moving target, and the first time you encounter that line you trip straight over it. The first morning you wake up to find her sitting upright on her own you’re so happy and proud that you say these things out loud, and she snaps at you. The words don’t make sense but her tone is crystal clear, and she’s never been like that with you before. It hurts, and the fact you can see she clearly regrets it as soon as she says it doesn’t make it any easier. She apologizes immediately, and you don’t run, but the two of you spend the day in an awkward orbit around one another. What happened to her wasn’t your fault, and it isn’t her fault either, but that knowledge alone isn’t enough to keep guilt and resentment from trying to choke you both. You refuse to let Jonah take this from you, so you both learn, and you move forward together.

The next morning you wake up to her smiling at you, and for the first time in three weeks she says something you fully understand. “I love you, Karrie.” You surge up to kiss her, the tension of yesterday long forgotten. 

The biggest issue is the vertigo Nico has been suffering from. It keeps her from sitting upright for too long, or walking unsupported. Just standing can be enough to make her dizzy, sometimes enough to vomit. You keep buckets stashed in any room Nico spends a significant amount of time in just in case. You help her sit up when she’s too weak to do it herself, continue to help her in the shower, and support her on the short walks Chase insists she take to help get her stamina back. 

You drag a chair into your room so she can practice going from sitting to standing over and over, trying to force her body to adjust to the change in position without making herself sick. It’s brutal to watch, and there’s nothing you can do to make it easier for her; she doesn’t seem to want you to. She’ll look over at you from time to time, like she’s making sure you’re still there, and you make sure you’re wherever she looks for you. She’s strong, and she’s dedicated, and if all she needs is to see you then you’ll be sure she finds you.

It’s around the time that Nico starts to be able to speak simple sentences again that Molly begins to get visibly impatient. You get it, you really do. It’s been a month since you and Chase came home, and you’ve all been so focused on helping Nico recover that any plans to rescue Gert have fallen to the wayside. Molly scratches a tally into the wall across from Alex’s room, and does her best to add to it when someone is there to see her. It’s not like you don’t want to rescue Gert (Chase in particular is starting to unravel the longer she’s gone), but you also can’t rush Nico’s recovery. And that was to say nothing of Tina and Jemma. 

Tina has been waiting for a month to be allowed to see her daughter. Jemma has been waiting for a month to get a body of her own. It’s part of the deal: she’ll help you stop Jonah from summoning the Gibborim, but she wants a body in exchange. A hybrid body like yours, one that won’t break down and that will hopefully keep her from going insane from the mismatch of Majesdanian/Human perceptions of time. The kind of body she can only get through magic, and tricky magic at that. The kind Nico really shouldn’t attempt until she’s able to speak normally again, and Jemma has been very insistent about getting her body before she helps you find Gert. So you’re stuck.

...xXx…

You’re into the fourth week of Nico’s recovery and she’s been gaining ground. It takes her a while, but she can almost speak normally again (though still nothing longer than three syllables, so to your vague distaste Karrie you remain). She managed an unassisted shower the other day, and can get down the stairs in five minutes now. She’s improving, and none of you can think of a reason to delay Tina seeing her. Which is how you find yourself standing in the dining room on a Wednesday evening as Nico worries at her nails. The Staff rests in its holster on her back, a non negotiable requirement on Nico’s part. She goes deadly still when Tina turns the corner.

And it is Tina, not Jemma. Jemma has never looked at Nico like she’s a miracle. Tina walks cautiously into the room, awkwardly reaching to hug Nico. Nico hesitates but allows the contact, tucking her head into her mother’s collarbone. You leave once you’re sure they won’t start fighting. They deserve some privacy, and you know they have a lot to talk about. 

Four hours later you get a text from Nico, and you meet her at the bottom of the stairs. She looks exhausted when you settle next to her, and she leans against you immediately. “How did it go?”

She shrugs and flips through the notebook she keeps with her, coming to her list of prepared phrases and just pointing at “difficult”. You hum in understanding and stroke her hair, feeling her positively melt against you. “Do you want to go to bed?” She nods, and after a quick glance to be Chase isn’t there to see you, you fly her up the stairs. (You know he’s right about Nico needing to do these things herself to help recover, but what’s right in the long term isn’t always what’s best in the short term.)

Nico is too tired to even bother getting undressed, and just flops onto the bed. You roll your eyes and help her out of her shoes while she wriggles out of her sling and bra. You curl up next to her and are ready to sleep when she whispers in your ear, “can I show you something?” Nico is smiling shyly at you and you nod, curious. She rolls away from you onto her back and takes a deep breath before reaching towards the ceiling. For a second you don’t see anything, and then purple sparks are floating up from her hand. They hover above you like fireflies, interweaving with your light and making it seem even brighter by contrast. No scales, no Staff, just her. Nico grins at you, “I’m a witch.”

You shake your head in amazement, leaning down to kiss her. She smiles against your lips, and you fall asleep in the glow of your combined powers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so Nico's powers. In the comic, characters who knew her parents are constantly surprised that she doesn't have any abilities of her own, and they constantly flip-flop on her having additional powers (I think in Avengers Undercover she can also teleport, and when she gets the Witch Arm she can flyand the only reason I can think of for her parents not teaching her magic in the comic would have been to protect their identities. That is not the case in the show: Tina is shown teaching Nico how to use the Staff, and actually offers to give her additional lessons. 
> 
> I cut out about a thousand words of Nico and Tina talking about Tina's motivations, Amy, and magic, which might turn into a companion piece for this, I'm not sure.


	7. Resolution

Nico’s progress begins to slow, but you see so little of her that you don’t notice at first. She is always up before you, and if it weren’t for the kiss she presses to your cheek and the “I love you” she whispers in your ear, you wouldn’t be sure she’d gone to bed. You still wait in the room while she showers in case she has a vertigo attack, and you help her up the stairs when she asks, but otherwise she’s busy all hours of the day.

Nico spends every waking minute with Tina, learning magic and sparring. You can see them in the hall sometimes, moving through stances at a glacial pace as Nico tries to find a balance between compensating for her missing arm and not setting off her vertigo. It’s ferociously difficult, and the main clue that the two are training is often the sound of Nico dry heaving and gagging as she fights not to vomit. Sometimes you can hear Tina lecturing her over the sound.

It’s clear Tina is unimpressed (distressed? Anxious?) with Nico’s lack of progress. Her balance is dreadfully poor, the pace she can manage slow, and having to turn her head too quickly sends her sprawling (everything Tina asks her to do seems to involve turning her head). You’re sitting on the stairs reading when you hear Nico yelp in pain, and you turn in time to see Tina circling to her right.

Nico curls to protect her injured side, and you watch Tina send her to the ground with a hit to the back of her knee. You’re on your feet in an instant, already moving to help her up when Tina speaks. “Get up.”

Nico doesn’t move except to curl a little closer around herself, and Tina’s tone makes you stop. Her voice is quivering just the slightest bit, a single note of fear laced through the strict words. “Nico, get up.”

Moving to protect her side must have triggered a dizzy spell because Nico crumples to the ground when she tries to rise. “Nico, if I was Jonah you’d be dead by now, _get up_.” You watch Nico force herself to her knees, only to immediately fall over as the nausea pulses through her. Tina flinches as Nico groans, and she walks away, leaving her daughter lying on the floor. You think you see her tremble as she leaves, but you’re so mad at her you don’t care. 

You sit down next to Nico, running your fingers through her hair. You press a kiss to her forehead. “Would a bath make this better, or worse?” 

A bath is the most extravagant gift you can offer. Showers at the Hostel are always brief, lukewarm affairs at the best of times, as the hot water tank is as decrepit as the rest of the place. But you have a secret, a trick you discovered while honing your powers. It is wasteful and greedy, but you can use your light to heat things, and with enough experimenting you learned how to heat a bath without steaming yourself like a lobster. The first time you’d suggested this to Nico she’d literally squealed in delight. Now, she merely shrugs. 

The two of you head upstairs, and she nods when you repeat the question, so you head to the bathroom. Nico is sometimes more comfortable with speaking when you’re doing something else, and you’re hoping that prepping the bath will be enough of an invitation. Chase waggles his eyebrows when he sees you heading off to be alone, and you scowl at him. 

You and Nico haven’t had sex yet: Nico has wanted to (and so have you, honestly), but every time you’ve tried Nico’s ability to speak has deteriorated to the point where you don’t feel comfortable going any further. Anger, frustration, lust - strong emotions make speaking more difficult, and the last thing you want is to do something she isn’t okay with because she can’t tell you it’s wrong. You will not be like the men who tried to hurt you.

Nico’s voice is small, and when she speaks it hits you deep in the chest. “I want to go back to when she ignored me, it was better than this.” You focus on heating the water, pouring more energy into it than is strictly safe so you can turn around just that second faster.

Nico is standing before you, her hair down, shaking. You expect her to break when you pull her into your arms. You’re ready for it, but it never comes. She clutches at you, lips brushing against your neck, and you hold her tighter. 

It’s all you can do.

...xXx…

After the night in the bathroom, you imagine Nico breaking down many times over the next two weeks, start having nightmares about it. You let her think they’re about your time in the tube as she holds you, wipes your tears, tells you that she loves you so _so_ much, and how strong you are for surviving. You can’t bring yourself to tell her that you’re afraid for something that hasn’t happened yet.

(You dream of Nico on her knees, screaming and clutching her left arm after a failed attempt to bring it back, Tina yelling at her to get up. Nico lying on the bathroom floor, so dizzy and sick that she can’t move. Her falling behind because she can’t run without getting dizzy, and what if Jonah grabs her by the ribs this time, atomizes her before you can reach her? 

What if the pieces she breaks into are too small for you to hold? Too sharp? What if she needs you and you fail? What if she doesn’t? What if she decides she’s better off without you? You don’t want to know what trying to live through this is like without her.)

Nico strokes your hair, and settles you against her bad shoulder once your breathing levels out. You watch as she conjures four deep purple lights above you. You reach out to touch one, and it rests gently in your hand, a sleepy kind of warmth radiating from it. Nico wraps her arm around your waist, and the light sends her features into sharp relief. “It’ll be okay, I promise,” she whispers.

You burrow into her shoulder, press a kiss to her collarbone, and trust her. 

...xXx…

Nico shakes you awake at one in the morning, and she’s so frantic that you think you’re under attack. “Nico, what-“

“I forgot.” 

You frown, not following at all. “Forgot what?” Nico just shakes her head, violently enough that you’re afraid she’ll send herself into a dizzy spell. You cup her face more to stop her from getting dizzy than to soothe her. (You might strive to be a good girlfriend, but she also just woke you up at one in the morning.) “Nico, what did you forget?”

Nico leans into your hand, and you can feel tears. “It was her birthday,” she whispers, “and I forgot. How could I forget that, Karrie? She’s my sister, how could I forget her birthday?” You pull Nico down into you and she shakes against your neck. She is trying so hard not to cry and it breaks your heart. You don’t know what to say, so you just keep repeating that Amy would forgive her, that she loved her, that you’ve been through a lot and she would understand. (You try not to think about the fact that Tina forgot as well, that all of you did, that your friend is truly beginning to slip from your mind.)

It takes you a while to notice that Nico is saying something. “Why didn’t mom try and bring her back?” 

“I don’t know,” you whisper, pulling back so you can see her face. Her eyes are swollen and red, and you gently wipe beneath her eyes. “Maybe she was afraid someone would retaliate.” 

Nico’s face hardens, settling into the determined expression she always has before a mission. “ My mother may have been afraid to try and save Amy but I’m not. We’re a family,” she says, “and if one of us is missing, we’re not whole. We’re going to get Gert back, and then I'm going to bring her back.”

“Nico-“ 

“I have to try, Karrie,” her voice is quiet and serious. “I’m asking you as my girlfriend to let me try.” 

There’s so much that can go wrong. So many ways it could fail and hurt her worse, and Nico is just starting to get used to how she is now. You look at her, and you see the girl you’re in love with, asking you to help her through this. You cup the back of her head, and lean your forehead against hers. “Let’s get our family back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because when has necromancy ever gone wrong?
> 
> I know in the comic Nico can't use resurrection spells because she used it trying to save [Redacted] after they died, but the spell failed because they didn't have a body. Amy may be all corpsified and gross, but she's still got a body, so by god Nico is gonna try!


	8. Preparation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tina and Nico, arguing since forever.

The nine of you settle on your plan of attack, breaking it down into stages.

1\. Chase steals a van  
2\. Nico separates Jemma from Tina  
3\. Alex and Tina locate Gert  
4\. Tina and Leslie go into hiding (this particular point took a week to get them to agree to)  
5\. Road trip  
6\. Rescue Gert  
7\. Profit 

Steps one through four all need to be completed within the week, which doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Tina starts teaching Nico how to enchant objects in addition to all the other magic she’s learning, so you see even less of her than you were already expecting.

You’re on your way to try and steal a van (you and Chase committing the actual theft, Molly and Xavin on lookout) when Molly stops you. “Chase, where did you leave the Gibb van?”

“Back by the bus station, why?” 

Molly grins, gesturing for you all to lean in, as if anyone would bother eavesdropping on you. “Maybe we don’t need to steal a van; maybe we just need to get our old one back.” You, Xavin, and Chase all look at each other. It’s at least an hour long detour to get to the bus station, and even if you’re no longer wanted criminals, odds are your wanted poster will still be there. Someone may call the number, tip Jonah off to where you are. In the wildly unlikely event that the van is still there, all the tires will probably be missing. The fuel will certainly be siphoned off.

That said, your current plan is to wander around and hope someone leaves their keys in the ignition. You take the detour.

...xXx…

You cannot believe the van is still there.

Molly has grabbed Xavin’s hands and is jumping up and down triumphantly while you and Chase stare in slack jawed amazement. Tucked down an alley, hidden under a couple of tarps, is the Gibb van, wheels and gasoline intact. 

“See? See, I told you the van would still be here! Who would steal a creepy church’s creepy van?” 

You frown at her out of reflex. The teachings of the church have been good for you personally, but after the last few months you really want to distance yourself from everything Gib related. You turn to Chase. “Do we even still have the keys?”

“No, but I know where they are.” Chase starts pulling the tarps off the van, scrutinizing every inch. “I threw them on the roof when I hid the van, they should still be there.” 

You fly up as quickly as you can, praying that no one sees you. It takes about ten minutes scrambling around to actually find the keys, and by the time you’re back on the ground Molly and Chase have remembered the reason you ditched the van in the first place: “Church of Gibborim” stands bold, written in foot high lettering. You all just stare for a minute, at as much of a loss now as you were three months ago how to fix this, when Molly pulls your shopping list out of her pocket and adds "spray paint" at the bottom. 

You laugh a little as you all pile into the van. It was a tight fit with six people; it’ll be an absolute nightmare with seven, and even worse once you get Gert and Old Lace back. You settle into the passenger seat as Chase starts the engine, smiling back at Molly and Xavin. 

You can’t wait to have your family back.

...xXx…

Even with the detour, the four of you get back far ahead of schedule. You and Xavin are loading Molly up with groceries (she took great pride in never making more than one trip from the car, even before she knew she had super strength) when Alex comes Looney Toons skidding around the corner. “You can’t be here right now,” he says, taking the bags off your hands. “You should go to your room, like, right now.”

“Did you just tell me to go to my room?” Alex winces at that, glancing back over his shoulder. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I just think it would be best if Tina and Nico didn’t see you right now.” 

You don’t even know what to say to that.

“Nico and her mom have been arguing about you since you left.” Alex looks so uncomfortable, and you’re glad he’s warned you. You feel your chest tighten in a way you don’t like, and you apologize to Xavin and Molly before you rush from the room.

It’s one of those things that has always worried you about your relationship, deep in the back of your mind. You know Nico loves you - that isn’t even a question - but you don’t know how Nico feels about not being straight. You’ve tried talking to her about it, but she’d always gotten so defensive that you’d let the subject drop. And you get it: now isn’t the best time to be sorting out your identity, there are bigger things at stake here, but a part of you still wonders. Every time you’re holding hands, or curled up in bed together, you worry. Hell, Nico can be grinding in your lap, sucking on your tongue, and on some level you’ll still be wondering if she’s really okay with this. 

You can hear Nico and Tina yelling from your room, and you bury yourself under the pillows to block out the sound. They’re yelling in Japanese so you don’t understand what they’re saying, but the knowledge they’ve been fighting about _you_ is enough to make you want to disappear. Maybe you were wrong about everything: maybe Jemma flirting with women was all her, maybe Tina doesn’t approve of her daughter dating another girl. Dating someone who isn’t human. 

(Maybe she just doesn’t want Nico dating the child of Amy’s killer). 

You crawl so deep into your own mind that you miss the sound of Nico stomping up the stairs, and don’t realize you aren’t alone anymore until she crawls under the comforter next to you. She pulls you so you’re laying against her chest and you bury your face in her collarbone. She kisses the top of your head and you relax a little. Fighting with Tina isn’t going to make Nico stop dating you; if anything, it would make her date you harder. But the idea that someone would hate your relationship because of who or what you are is something that has only ever been in the abstract before now, and the possibility that it may be real is crushing. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I know you don’t like it when people fight.”

“You were fighting about me,” you say, not in the mood to dance around this. Nico nods, running her fingers through your hair. You can’t decide if it feels soothing or patronizing right now. 

You push yourself up so you can look at each other better; she’s frowning, but you’re pretty sure it’s not at _you_. “She keeps insisting that I should just make a copy of you for Jemma to possess because it would be an easier spell and, and somehow she doesn’t see anything wrong with that.” 

You stare at her in disbelief. “You were fighting about a spell.” 

“Yeah, she’s being a pain about it. Like, making a copy of the only hybrid we know would be way easier than making an entirely new person, but I’m not cloning my girlfriend.” Nico smirked up at you. “Besides, I’ve talked to Jemma and she says she wants to be Asian, and I’m sure as hell not going to make her be white if she doesn’t want to be.”

You can’t even believe what you’re hearing. That must show in your face because Nico is sitting up properly now, fingers tracing your face. “What’s wrong,” she asks, voice low and worried. You sigh, and tracing your fingers along the inside of her wrist. 

“When Alex told me you were arguing about me, I thought it was about our relationship.” Understanding blooms in Nico’s eyes, and she shakes her head rapidly. 

“Karolina, I promise that we weren’t arguing about our relationship. My mom doesn’t have a problem with it; if anything she likes you more than Alex.” Nico smiles at you. “Everything is okay, I promise.” 

You’re in two minds about how to respond. On the one hand, you just spent the last hour curled up in bed terrified that someone disapproved of your relationship, and you really want to talk about that. On the other, it was a misunderstanding, and you can put off grappling with the concept of living in a homophobic society for another day. 

You’ve got enough to deal with for now: institutional homophobia can wait. You tangle your fingers together and tell her you believe her. It’s as easy as breathing.

...xXx…

Nico separates Tina and Jemma the morning you leave. It’ll be hard on Jemma, adjusting to a new body on the road, but there hadn’t been much choice. The spell was the most complex Nico had ever done; any extra time to shape it was time well spent.

The van was loaded, the Rolls ready to go. They’d spent all of yesterday camouflaging the Hostel and now there was nothing left to do but separate them. You and Nico had spent a long time getting her ready this morning. Nico does her makeup for the first time in two months while you braid her hair, and you help her into proper clothes. For the first time since the battle, Nico is done up in her full goth regalia, the sling packed in her bag rather than worn. You expected to have a deeper reaction to seeing her this way; that this moment would be like seeing her again for the first time. But that doesn’t happen: Nico has been herself every moment of her recovery. When she sees herself in the mirror, you know that it means something to _her_ , and in the end that’s all that matters. 

After all the work she put into figuring out the logistics of the spell, it’s staggeringly anticlimactic. She walks into the foyer where Leslie and Tina are waiting (they’re going into hiding together until the baby is born, which neither of them are particularly happy about), activates the Staff, and says “self determination.” A ripping, squelching noise follows, and the next moment Tina is lying on the floor, a glowing girl standing next to her.

Beneath the shifting yellow, blue, and purple glow, the girl looks alarmingly like if Tina and Leslie had a child together. She’s your height, with thick black hair, lots of freckles, and pretty brown eyes. She’s also totally naked, which doesn’t seem to be bothering _her_ , but is certainly bothering _you_. She looks at you, and her smile eclipses the glow. “Hi,” says Jemma. Leslie shoves a bundle of clothes into her arms before she can say anything else.

“Clothes before anything,” she says, and it’s such a Mom Tone that you find yourself laughing. Jemma laughs too, and her colours intensify. The second she has the dress over her head she has Nico in her arms, lifting her off the ground and spinning her around.

“Thank you so, so much,” she says once she sets her down, fixing her hair in a way so reminiscent of Tina it’s disconcerting. Nico smiles at her, and then you’ve got an armful of Jemma, laughing in your ear. 

You have a sister. You don’t know how to feel about it yet, but as you all pile into the van, and watch her interact with the others as herself for the first time, you think you’re going to like it.


	9. Commencement

It’s been six months since you’ve seen Gert. You’ve been searching for three months, and each day wears Molly and Chase down a little more. You get it; if Nico had been missing this long, you’re not sure what you would do. (You very deliberately do not think about what you would do.) Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to speed things up.

The seven of you spent three months following Dale’s digital trail to Seattle, where all your investigating lead you to a graveyard and a double headstone. While Alex, Chase, and Molly double checked his research, looking for any indication that his lead was wrong, you grab the x ray goggles and check the grave. Totally, blessedly, completely empty. After that, things slow down.

You take four days to give Nico time to concentrate on a new spell, and at the end you have in your possession a magic coin. It can only answer yes or no questions, but with it you now have a rudimentary GPS. While she works on the enchantment, Chase, Xavin, and Jemma sell the van, trading it in for a ludicrously oversized motor home, the sort of thing Gert will hate on sight. But Tina has given you access to a multimillion dollar slush fund when you parted ways, why not put it to use? After three months all sleeping crammed together, it's nice to have your own space again. 

Nico and Alex spend a day running the coin through a series of baseline questions before starting to narrow down Gert’s location the next morning. Is she alive? Is she in North America? Is she in America? It takes them an hour to determine that she’s in Louisiana, and they get lucky with their first guess of city. Gert is in New Orleans, which Nico is thrilled about, for some reason.

“I have a friend there,” she tells you, smiling. “He and his girlfriend can start looking for her while we drive down.” It’s stupid, but something in your chest unclenches at the word girlfriend. You’re not a jealous person, but after hearing this you suspect the last few months may have made you a bit possessive. “I’m excited to meet him in person,” she continues, “he brought me back to you.”

“What do you mean?” 

Nico falls into one of her “organizing thoughts” silences, and you do your best to be patient, even though your mind is spinning at her words. Had she been kidnapped and not told any of you? How could the others not have noticed? How did this not come up before? Nico doesn’t give you long to spiral. 

“That week I spent unconscious, I was stuck in my own mind. Couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do anything, but because of the Staff my mind was connected to this other place. I met someone there, and he helped me wake up.” She doesn’t look at you as she speaks, looking instead out across the park you’re all currently in. It isn’t a complete answer, but it’s the one she’s comfortable giving, and that will do for now. You smile and take her hand.

“I can’t wait to meet him.”

...xXx…

It’s a thirty nine hour drive from Seattle to New Orleans, so you decide to split it up over two weeks to spare Chase and Alex. You end up spending an additional week in Seattle getting the motorhome ready for the trip, and it is somewhere in there that you go for your first ever date.

You and Nico have been together for months at this point, but with everything that was happening you never found time to go on an actual date. But on your second day of thumb twiddling while you wait to get a licence for the motorhome, you manage to drag her away from the others and out into the city for a picnic. The two of you spend the day at Gas Works park, and Nico smiles the entire time. It’s grey and rainy, your lunch gets wet, and you both spend the next two days in bed with horrible colds, but neither of you really care. You spent the day together, and it was perfect.

...xXx...

For the most part, the seven of you enjoy the freedom of being on the road. It ends up being a productive time: Jemma begins to teach you the Majesdanian language (which doesn’t have a specific verbal name- it’s a visual language communicated exclusively through the lights you emit, and you’re so thrilled to learn it), Chase and Alex start teaching Xavin and Nico to drive to help with the fatigue, and Molly proves once again that she’s the undisputed queen of board games. 

Still, the extreme proximity grates on you, and by the fourth day you’re all desperate for a bit of space. Molly takes off to explore the second you’ve got the motor home sorted at a pay by the hour motel, Jemma argues her way into the first shower, and Nico locks herself in the main bedroom of the motorhome, telling you not to come in until she asks. In the end you spend half an hour playing cards with Alex, Chase, and Xavin. 

You head back to the motorhome after your shower, Nico’s request completely forgotten. So when you walk into the room and see Nico tying up her hair with a metallic left hand you can’t help it, you scream. Her head snaps up, panic in her eyes. “I can explain.”

“How- when- _how_?”

She lowers her hands from her hair, lets you run your fingers over her new hand, the place where it joins with her arm. “I’ve been working on the spell for a while now; I didn’t want to say anything if it didn’t work.” 

You look at her as you twine your fingers together, voice serious. “It wouldn’t have mattered to me if you never got it back, and if I ever gave you that impression I’m really sorry, because that was never my intention.” 

Nico shakes her head, squeezing your hand. It’s the wrong side of painful, and you fight the urge to flinch. She must see something in your eyes, though, because she immediately loosens her grip. “Karrie, I tried to get it back because I wanted it back. This,” she flexes her arm, the metal catching in the light, “is the first step towards that. If I can make this and have it work, then I know I can get my arm back further down the road. I did this for me, not you.” 

The tension you’d been holding in your shoulders since you saw her new arm relaxes, and you smile. “I’m glad; that’s how it should be. The only one who should decide how you recover is you.”

Nico kisses you (technically; you’re both smiling too much for it to be a proper kiss), and you toy with the idea of spending the next couple hours lazily making out when Molly bangs on the door, loudly announcing that it’s Nico’s turn to shower and she has thirty seconds to get out there if she doesn’t want to lose her turn. 

She’s out the door in three seconds flat, and honestly? You can respect that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this took far longer than I expected, and in the end I wound up cutting the chapter in two. I really struggled with how to handle the topic of the Witch Arm: I know Nico has it in the comics, but I haven't read the comics in which she has it, so I hope that it turned out alright.
> 
> 7/4/19: Edited for clarity, time frame agreement, and because it's been about a month and found new things that needed fixing.


	10. Arrival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Car troubles, phone calls, and new friends.

Despite your solid start it takes you nearly a month to get to New Orleans. This isn’t technically anyone’s fault (depending on who you ask: Alex and Molly would argue a huge part of it was Nico’s fault), but it was still frustrating. You made good progress over the first five days: Nico revealing her Witch Arm made for a pretty good morale booster. Things go well until a drunk driver swerves into your lane and Nico is forced to teleport the motorhome into the ditch to avoid a collision. Luckily, the car is able to swerve back into its own lane before hitting the Rolls. So on the one hand you don’t get in a car accident and both of your cars are still intact. Those are objectively very good things. On the other hand, the motorhome is now completely stuck in a very narrow ditch that is impossible to drive out of. 

You know it’s impossible to drive out of because when Alex tried he nearly flipped the motorhome; you, Jemma, and Xavin managing to right it at the last possible second. Then Molly had tried to drag it out, but the angle was too steep and she ripped off the bumper trying to haul it up. Something snaps when she rips it off, and it takes Chase three frantic hours to get the motorhome back to a state where he thinks you could maybe still drive it. 

The billowing black smoke that starts when Alex starts the engine turns the “maybe” into a “no”. 

Nico conjures a ramp and Molly pushes it back onto the road enough for the tow truck to be able to tow it to the nearest town, and after nearly a day stuck in the ditch, you finally make it to Forest Hill, Texas, where you proceed to spend the three most boring weeks of your life while you wait for the part to come in to repair the motorhome.

Boring unfortunately doesn’t mean free of conflict, and by the time you finally roll into New Orleans you’re all excited to see the back of each other. Most of you end up fighting amongst yourselves (while they had been cordial enough back at the Hostel, Jemma has taken an intense dislike to Xavin since getting her own body), but the worst fight is between Nico and Molly, who have a blowout fight on the third day of waiting. 

“This is stupid, why don’t you just teleport us there? Your powers work again, why not just do that? We don’t need the stupid motorhome, we could be there right now!”

“We’re only eight hours away, I’m not wasting our only group teleport on a drivable distance.”

“Getting Gert back isn’t a waste!”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You just did!”

You and Chase are able to separate them in the end, and Nico spends the next three weeks in self imposed isolation, revising some complicated spell that she seems to scrap and start over daily. You split your time between keeping her company and hanging out with everyone else. Alex talks you through an algorithm he’s building to help narrow Gert’s location down by cross referencing the results of the coin with geographic data, which you freely admit is impressive. You go on crime stopping adventures with Molly, start teaching Chase more intricate types of braids, and between the tutelage of both Xavin and Jemma, your grasp of Majesdanian goes from bumbling to passable. 

Most importantly of all, Nico says your name.

It was the middle of the second week and when you went to check on her during Super Secret Spell Time she was gone, which you firmly regarded as a good thing. Nico, like Alex, has always been prone to isolating herself, and the fact she isn’t in your room is a good sign. None of the others know where she is, and you’re about to start genuinely looking for her when you hear her voice off the the right.

“You can’t just tell me you have two girlfriends and then not send me pictures of either of them!”

She’s leaning against a shaded tree, phone wedged against her shoulder as she makes a bunch of rocks appear and disappear with the Witch Arm. She waves with her other hand, cursing when it knocks her phones loose. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. Karolina says hi, by the way.”

Karolina. Not Karo, not Karrie, but Kar-oh-line-ah, your full, four syllable name that she hasn’t been able to say since you got her back. 

You rush forward and kiss her, pressing her back into the tree. Her phone falls again and you can vaguely hear whoever’s on the other end asking what’s going on, but honestly? You have more important things to be thinking about. Like the way she whimpers into your mouth, clutching you as close as she can and wrapping her arms around your neck. Your hand slips under her shirt, moving to cup her breast and her hand slips down to grab your ass and you’re rapidly coming to terms with the fact you’re going to lose your virginity against a tree when you’re suddenly standing back in your bedroom. “Did you just-?”

“Totally worth it.” Nico pushes you back onto the bed and you decide that yes, this was totally worth using her guaranteed two person teleportation spell.

...xXx…

When you reach New Orleans you do so with a pretty solid idea of where Gert is. Alex’s algorithm has coughed up a search area, and Nico’s friend Tyrone, along with his friends Evita, Tandy, Brigid, and Mina, have volunteered to help with your search however they can. The plan is for you and Nico to meet with them tomorrow while the others start divvying up the search area Alex has sketched out.

Nico is excessively nervous, chewing at her nails as she paces by the foot of your bed. 

“What if he isn’t actually real and I’ve just been making this all up in my head? That’s a stress thing, right? What if all the stress from our parents being killers is making me hallucinate him?” 

“You talk to Ty on the phone every couple of days. I’ve _seen_ you talking to him on the phone; his girlfriend gave you shit for ditching your phone call the other day. Yesterday Chase grabbed the phone from you and spent fifteen minutes describing Gert to him. I don’t for a second think you made him up.”

Nico looks at you and you wish you could take her nervousness away. You shuffle down the bed, sitting so you’re the same height and settling your arms on her shoulders. She relaxes slightly in your hold. “It’s going to be fine, Nico.” She nods like she doesn't quite believe you, but agrees to get some sleep, so you call it a win. It's not as much of a win as you had hoped, though. Nico wakes you up disgustingly early, banging around the room, opening and closing drawers. It takes her an hour to settle on an outfit. She does her makeup, then takes it all off because she isn't satisfied with it. When she goes to redo it a third time you interrupt her, walking over and laying your fingers on her wrist. You ignore the death glare she shoots you. “Why are you so nervous?”

You weren’t expecting any kind of response to your statement, so when she does answer you you’re a bit unprepared for it. “The second I meet him all of this is real. That place I went to in my mind, the one I couldn’t get out of? When I meet him it stops being a bad dream. It’s a real place that I was actually dying in, and it means that if he hadn’t found me I'd still be there. I never would have seen you again, and eventually that place would have just consumed me.” 

Just for a moment, you allow yourself to imagine that. To wake up after you had been rescued and realize that Nico gave up her life to save you. You would never get to hold her hand, never kiss her, never get to tell her you love her, because she traded her life for yours. 

You let her take as long as she needs to get ready.

...xXx…

You and Nico enter the voodoo shop armed with a copy of Alex’s search and rescue grid and the sort of unease that comes from being given directions in a city you're unfamiliar with by people you don't really know. Nico has the Staff hidden away under her white button up, and the two of you don’t have time to start getting anxious about not recognizing anyone before a girl in a purple shirt walks up to you. She’s gorgeous, and it takes your brain a few seconds to kick out of _oh my god she’s so pretty_ mode and actually process what she’s saying to you.

“You’re Nico and Karolina, right? I’m Evita, Ty asked me to meet you guys. He and Tandy are waiting at the church, we can head there now.” You nod, feeling a bit dazzled. Nico rolls her eyes at you, deliberately taking your hand as you leave the shop.

Evita chats with you on the way to the church, asking about school, Nico’s makeup, the drive down. She’s kind in a way that can’t be faked, and you find yourself talking freely. It’s nice to have someone new to talk to; you love your friends and your sister, but it’s refreshing to meet someone you don’t already know inside and out. The fact she doesn’t pry into anything uncomfortable is also considerate. 

She leads you to an abandoned church a few blocks away, and the three of you scramble along the scaffolding into the building. You know Nico trusts Ty and his friends but you’re still wary about showing off your powers in front of people you don’t know. Nico picks her way across the boards easily, but you stumble a little on the uneven walkway. When Evita offers you a hand to help climb in you take it. 

You don’t know what you were expecting about Tyrone. You know Nico had sent him pictures of you and the others (you remember pulling faces for a couple of them), but he had never sent her any of himself. He looks like an ordinary kid, but you suppose you and your friends looks ordinary, too. He’s talking to another girl, the two of them bent over a table, and he turns when you climb down. He smiles widely when he sees you, moving away from the table. “Hey Nico, it’s good to see you.”

It’s such a normal, understated response that you’re a little shocked. You and Nico look at each other, and then back at Tyrone. She reaches over to take your hand. “It’s good to see you, too. I think we have some catching up to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I thought this was going to take eleven chapters? How naive I was. This took way longer than it was supposed to. I could blame getting ready to move, a sharp uptick in work, waiting for Cloak and Dagger season two to come out, or any other number of things, but honestly this just needed to stew for a bit in my head.
> 
> About Karolina's name. I know it's Kar-oh-leena in the show, but it's Kar-oh-line-ah in the comic, and since that's what I've been calling her since I was thirteen I'm sticking with it.


	11. Reunions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your family is whole again, and you’ve never been happier.

It takes a while for you to figure Tandy out. She’s quiet and sarcastic, more reserved than Nico and even more prone to running. In the month you spend with her and Tyrone, it takes you three and a half weeks to realize she’s not angry at you and Nico, just worried about Ty. The second you realize this your heart melts, and you feel like you understand her better. 

Tandy’s attitude aside, she and Ty are a godsend. When you first arrived you expected it would take weeks to track Gert down and rescue her; between Ty, Tandy, and Brigid, you find her in two days. As for the rest of the time....

That’s spent making sure you won’t get caught.

The day after Tandy locates her you’re all staked out by the school, looking like some politically correct, multi-ethnic gang. Tandy is the only one who looks like she belongs: she looks so bored leaning against the wall that she’s practically become part of it. An act, you’re sure, but a convincing one. Everyone else is anxious: Molly is bouncing on her toes, Nico keeps taking her sling on and off, uncertain about how Gert would react to her missing arm. Chase is pacing so much that both Alex and Jemma yell at him to stop, and you end up draping an arm across his shoulder to try and keep him in place. The gesture is one part restraint to three parts concern. 

It takes you a moment to recognize Gert when she leaves the school. Her hair is brown rather than purple and it throws you for a moment, sends you reeling back to when you were all thirteen. If pressed, you’ll cite the deja vu as the reason you don’t stop Molly. “Gert! Gert we’re here!”

Molly’s running across the street at an incredibly confused looking Gert, Alex racing after her. A car very nearly clips him, the driver leaning on the horn and shouting. Molly has Gert locked in a hug before the rest of you are across the street, Gert shoving at her. “Let go of me! What the fuck is going on?” 

“Gert it’s us! We’re here to take you home!” Molly is crying, not letting go. Everyone is staring and your blood turns to ice when you see people pulling their phones out.

Alex notices this too, and he grabs Molly’s arm. “Molly, we have to go.”

“No! We just found her, I’m not leaving!” Everyone is staring at you and you’re about to just light up and fly you all away when you see Nico move beside you, hand disappearing behind her back. 

“Plot device!”

Rewinding time is the weirdest sensation: the closest you can compare it to is the time you tried to fly backwards, except that didn’t make you feel like your eyes were trying to invert. You handle it better than Chase, who pales to a dangerous shade of grey when you all land back across the street. Of all of you, Tandy seems to handle it best, though she’s leaning on the wall more heavily than before. 

Nico puts the Staff away, shaking her head. “That was my only rewind spell. We need to think this through more carefully.” She gives Molly a look you haven't seen in two years: it’s the look Amy would sometimes give you if one of you was being hasty. “Jemma and Xavin will follow Gert today to get visual confirmation on where she lives. In the meantime, Alex can try and get a better idea of where she goes based on her phone’s GPS. Then tomorrow, Alex, Karolina, and I will try and make contact with her again. If things go well and no one calls the police, Chase, Molly, and I can go again the day after. Agreed?” 

None of you argue. 

...xXx…

Hours later, Xavin and Jemma meet you back at the church, which the others are letting you use as a base. Molly is playing super-basketball against Tyrone while Tandy and Evita lounge on a nearby pew. Alex is set up at Ty’s desk, making good use of the mobile hotspot Tina gave you before you left. 

Despite the fact Jemma flies them both into the church all lit up (much to the chagrin of both Ty and Tandy) you don’t notice their arrival: you and Nico had decided you’d had enough Family Time and deserved some Alone Time instead, so it takes Chase banging on the door of the storage closet you’ve sequestered yourselves in to get your attention. Jemma winks at you when you walk back in and you flip her off. You’ve settled well into having a sister.

“Where did she go? Is she living in a nice house? Is she okay? Did you see Dale? Where’s Old Lace?” Molly is hanging upside down from the basketball hoop as she asks this, curling into crunches to avoid Tyrone’s efforts to teleport her down. Xavin solves the problem by becoming eight feet tall and simply lifting her.

“She’s living in a bungalow in the fourth ward. It’s nicer than the Hostel, and she seems fine. I haven’t seen Old Lace, but she has a black and white cat named Rufus.” Xavin shrinks back to normal size, flipping Molly so she’s right side up and putting her hat back on her head. “I can’t confirm this as I don’t know what Dale looks like, but she appeared to be alone.” 

Nico nods, crossing her arms. “One more day of observation.” 

Molly spins so fast her monkey hat goes flying off again, hitting Jemma in the face. She points an accusatory finger at Nico. “You said we could go the day after tomorrow.”

“And now I’ve changed my mind. We spend tomorrow staking out the house so we can get a better idea what Dale is doing and then we approach Gert.” 

It’s a testament to her tone of voice that no one argues.

...xXx…

Tomorrow turns into a week from now. Dale works at a nearby hospital, running samples in the lab. He drops Gert off at school in the morning, and gets home around seven each night. Gert has debate team on Wednesday and works in a coffee shop she clearly hates three times a week. Jemma and Xavin go there every day, keeping an eye on her. 

With Tyrone’s help, you and Alex break into Gert’s house one day when she’s at school. It’s too much to hope that you find a diary, but a look at the calendar hanging on her wall reveals therapist appointments, days out with friends, and several references to someone named Victor that you don’t mention to Chase. She seems happy.

There aren’t any pictures around the house more recent than two years old, though. It’s eerie: Dale and Stacy were the sort of parents who documented everything. No moment was considered too small. “Maybe they just aren’t very sentimental?” Ty sounds doubtful even as he asks the question. You and Alex don’t even have to answer for him to know he’s wrong.

...xXx...

There’s no sign of Old Lace anywhere in the house, and Mina hasn’t heard of anything weird being spotted around the bayou. Xavin tries turning into a gator, and they and Molly spend most of the day exploring to no avail. Molly is burnt to a crisp by the time they come back, covered in bug bites, her hair an absolute disaster. It’s the happiest she’s been in months.

“It was so cool, Karo, you have to go. We saw this giant catfish, it was almost as big as Xavin! You saw it too, right?” 

Xavin, from where they’re lying face down on a church pew, gives a thumbs up. They’re so exhausted that they didn’t bother appearing human, simply shifted back to their Skrull form and laid down. Animals, they explained, took a lot more effort than people. Something about the difference in organ systems. You leave a caramel macchiato next to them in thanks and get to work untangling Molly’s hair. 

You can see Nico and Alex playing with the coin in the corner, taking notes and speaking in hushed tones. Perhaps noticing your staring, Nico turns to look at you. Her face softens the way it does every time she sees you - a fact which never fails to thrill you - and she opens her mouth to say something. Now, you expect her to say something along the lines of “How was your day,” or maybe “I love you.” Pretty much anything besides what she actually says.

“Feel like going back to school?”

...xXx…

Being in school after so many months is weird. You’re sure part of this is due to the fact you’re wearing some of Tandy’s clothes in an attempt at a disguise, but after being able to come and go as you please, the idea of going to classes and taking notes seems almost novel. Fun, in a way. You’re sure that won’t last.

You aren’t in any of Gert’s classes, but you pass her several times in the hall, and you can feel her staring at you during lunch. You force yourself not to go up to her; the idea is to entice, to get her to follow you of her own volition. Out of all of you, you apparently have “changed the least in the last two years and look the most generic” (which you’re trying not to take as an insult), so the chances of Gert following you out of curiosity are relatively high. 

You’re also reading Kafka, wearing a bracelet patterned with the lesbian pride flag, and let Nico do your makeup that morning, because it never hurts to stack the deck a little.

Gert doesn’t approach you that day, but she does the next, walking up to you during lunch. “Cockroaches, right?” She looks nervous, you give her a reassuring smile, and when she asks if you’d like to grab coffee later you say yes. 

...xXx...

You feel bad about what you’re doing: Gert is perfectly lovely on your coffee date. She asks you about school, and your medical alert bracelet (not to be nosy, but instead to be sure she chooses a risk free venue), and about what kind of books you like. She’s sarcastic and sweet, and you can totally understand why Chase fell in love. She talks about how you remind her of one of the friends she lost in a bus crash two years ago, and how much she misses her sister. It breaks your heart to hear all this, but your mind is never far from how badly you need her to go to the bathroom. Tandy and Tyrone are hanging out in one of the stalls, waiting to poof Gert back to the church. You wonder how exactly Ty will do that if his eyes are closed, but that’s a him problem, not a you problem. 

It takes until her second coffee for Gert to mention that you look like someone she used to know, and were you related to anyone named Dean? You frown. “You mean the people who run that crazy whacked out pseudo-cult out west?” That gets her laughing hard enough that she doesn’t notice when your phone pings with a message from Tandy, who apparently isn’t in the bathroom like you thought. 

“Stop being charming! Go get a drink or something so she can leave the table without feeling like she’s being rude. It’s like you’ve never been on a date before.” 

You turn red at that, and quickly excuse yourself to buy another coffee. In the mirror behind the counter, you can see Gert make her way to the bathroom. A few seconds later you get a text from Tandy and book it out of the cafe. Even with how close the location you chose is to the church, you aren’t there for the moment Gert gets her memory back. You arrive to the aftermath, to see her clinging to Chase and Molly, Nico and Alex and the others standing back to give them a moment. Everyone is crying, even Tandy, and the moment Gert looks at you with recognition in her eyes is one of the greatest moments of your life. A piece of your heart clicks back into place, and you pray for the first time in months. 

It feels good again.

...xXx…

It’s been a month since you got Gert back and came home to find Old Lace waiting for you, and when Nico asks you to come with her one night you agree. You’ll always follow when she asks, and that’s how you find yourself standing in a graveyard you haven’t seen in years, watching Nico pace. She has the Staff in one hand, and is biting the nails of her Witch Arm as she paces. You’re worried for her.

She stops pacing before you can touch her, muttering “get on my level.” A coffin appears before you and you feel sick. You don’t need to see the ground collapse in front of Amy’s grave to know it’s hers: this casket is burned into your memory. 

“Nico, are you sure about this?” What if she fails? What if she doesn’t? For a moment you can glimpse the beginnings of the scope of Nico’s power, and you’re terrified. Just for a second, just for a flash, but the potential of what Nico can do makes the hair on your arms stand up. 

Nico doesn’t answer you. She’s committed now, pulling the spell together in her mind. “Find your way home.” There are no scales around her eyes this time, no flash of purple. Just the words. Her own power. Nothing happens for long enough for you to become certain it failed, and then there’s a frantic banging from the coffin.

Nico lunges, ripping the lid off to reveal Amy, healthy if a bit pale, crying and making no sense. You and Nico help pull her from the coffin, wiping tears from her eyes, telling her everything will be okay. The scar on your heart from Amy’s loss heals in one, and you look at Nico: your love, your anchor, the source of all your determination. She looks back over Amy’s head and smiles at you. 

Your family is whole again, and you’ve never been happier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took so much longer than I intended, but it’s finally here! Shout out to the new Runaways teaser for giving me the final inspiration to finish this story. The ending is weaker than I’d have liked, but it exists!
> 
> Edits to come over the next couple days.


End file.
